


Not a career any longer

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Class Differences, Death and Taxes, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:13:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1562558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surtax, wartime inflation, death duties... by 1948 being a gentleman definitely isn't a career any longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not a career any longer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AJHall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/gifts).



"The death duties would be bad enough," Julian murmured to himself, a litany of losses yet imperfectly grasped, "but then there's the surtax, and I can't see..."

Elaine Fleming had died a week earlier, very prematurely, of a stroke. She had been only fifty-nine. It might have been said that she had been unable to accept life after the war; Hilary was half-convinced that the war in question had been the Great War. 

Through a caprice of fate it had been Hilary who had found herself called to the deathbed, with old Dr. Lowe dead during the war and his young successor, unfit for the Forces due to pleurisy, unreachable. There had been nothing to be done; even in the best of London hospitals there would have been nothing. But Hilary sometimes wondered whether Julian, in the extremity of his grief, blamed her for his mother's death. In the aftermath she had explained the medical details to him. He had listened silently and with apparent comprehension, then said finally, not so inaccurately, "Like what happened to me. Only you didn't save her life."

If he had been there he would have witnessed her desperation to save Elaine Fleming, who had asked for her son, then for her own mother, never acknowledging Hilary's presence at all. After she finally slipped away, disdaining Hilary's attentions to the last, Hilary had checked her watch, recorded the time of death, and said a quiet prayer that she should not feel this to be a moment of victory over her rival. She was not triumphant at all; she was only weary and regretful, hoping that perhaps this tragedy might finally exorcise the ghost that had haunted their marriage from the first, and Julian from the womb. But there was to be no respite, for the grasp of Elaine Fleming was stronger than death.

From where Hilary was sitting now, in the chair at the other side of the fire, she could see the furious, rejecting crossings-out that marred the page as Julian bent over his calculations. He held the pen awkwardly, his hand still scarred from the minor burns that had - thankfully, though Hilary never would say it - ended his career as a fighter pilot in the autumn of 1940.

"Hilary, darling," he said, "be an angel and come and check these figures for me?"

Julian's voice was plaintive, demanding affection and comfort far more than truth. Nonetheless Hilary, with a sigh, got up and went over to sit beside Julian on the settee. She buried herself in the numbers while Julian buried his face against her neck; she patted him absentmindedly with one hand while she scribbled with the other.

Tax percentages and incomings and outgoings held no terror for Hilary, who had been managing the accounts of her own practice for over a decade. Before that there had been a medical degree and a First in Chemistry; and the glorious tutelage of the mathematics mistress at Shrewsbury High School; and even before that the discipline of daily algebra lessons from her second brother, when she had been still almost too young for a governess.

"I always was terrible at maths at school," Julian murmured. "I don't know how you manage; it seems like conjuring."

 _More Faust than Helen_ , thought Hilary wryly; she was faintly unsettled by this praise, which seemed to suggest that she retained a quality of the divine for Julian after all of these years. His mother's death seemed to have driven him not forward but back, into a childish bewilderment and longing. He had been inconsolable since his arrival for the funeral five days earlier, weeping quietly by night, strangely silent in the day, disappearing for hours at a stretch. Hilary suspected that he was going to Mott's Farm, his refuge in times of trouble. She had not asked, for fear of forcing him into a lie. 

Julian had left his accounts in a muddle - a hopelessly optimistic muddle, as soon became clear. Hilary found a perverse comfort in putting it right. She worked her way through to the inevitable conclusion, writing down the final figure, then circling and underscoring it as if to make its reality plain. It had a minus sign in front of it.

Julian looked at her in uncomprehending grief, as though she had just pronounced his mother's death all over again. "But that can't be right."

"Darling, I'm sorry; it is."

"She never talked to me about it. But I was always certain that... you know, I had my eleven hundred a year, which seems much less now than it used, but she had a life interest in the estate, and that must have been a good bit larger, mustn't it? We never seemed to be short before..."

He spoke awkwardly, a true gentleman bred if not born, taught from his youngest years that to talk about money, or seem to care about it, ranked high in the catalogue of sins.

"Before the war, darling, I'm sure you weren't." She had instinctively fallen back upon the brisk, practical tone of a doctor who must give unwelcome news every day. "But if you look here..."

The accounts told an eloquent history. By the standards of _Burke's Landed Gentry_ the estate was not that large, though the acreage did qualify the Fleming family (and, in the latest edition, Hilary herself) for a place in its pages. One suspected that there had previously been more, perhaps sold off during the agricultural depression of the eighties and nineties. What land remained brought little in the way of income, despite the fields that had been ploughed under during the war; most of Julian's inheritance, barring the house itself, came in the form of sensible investments in stocks and bonds. 

Though Mrs Fleming had been a good steward of her son's inheritance, there had been the inevitable costs of modernising and keeping up a small but meticulously managed country house, followed by wartime taxation, surtax, inflation, the rates, and then of course the ruinous death duties. Very little was left.

"And there's the roof to fix on top of it all," said Julian mournfully.

Mrs Fleming had shut up the house in 1941 and spent the remainder of the war living in a hotel suite in Bournemouth. The house had been occupied first by a small girls' school and later by the Army; after returning to Larch Hill in 1946 Mrs Fleming had clearly been unequal to coping with the depredations of time and foreign occupation. She had been unwell even then; Hilary suspected now that the first small stroke had come earlier, perhaps not so long after Julian's marriage.

Hilary could not help wondering whether all of this constituted Elaine Fleming's revenge. Her own father had been a solicitor and she was well aware that a good part of his business, especially during and after the Great War, had involved advising the gentry of Shropshire on ways to minimise estate duties. More could have been done, without question. Why had it not been? Perhaps she would have considered the very thought to be vulgar and grasping. Or perhaps, in the war years, she had simply not expected her only son to outlive her. Though she had not disinherited Julian, as they had once believed she might, the effect had been ironically the same.

"But if this is right," said Julian - his lack of belief stung Hilary, for the calculations were sound - "then what am I to do? I can't fix the roof and keep up the house - as it is I shan't even be able to pay the death duties - and then if I've no capital..."

He shook his head with the haunted expression of a young gentleman who has just seen a comfortable private income disappear into the ether.

"I should hate to have to ask you for money," he finished, clearly asking her for money.

Hilary felt a cold chill. "Julian, my dearest," she said, as gently as she could, "you'll have to sell the house."

The question of how quickly they could sell up had been in her mind ever since the funeral; Julian had clearly never considered the possibility.

"My God," he said, shocked and affronted. "I couldn't."

"As you've said, darling, what other choice have you?"

In the immediate aftermath of Julian's break with his mother, Hilary had thought that he might choose to forgo the respectable private income to which he was entitled upon his marriage. Yet in the end he had chosen what he believed was the lesser of two evils - dependence upon his family wealth rather than dependence upon Hilary. She was surprised now at the strength of his attachment to the family estate, when no Fleming blood flowed in his veins. But perhaps she should not have been. He had never known Richard Fleming; it was memories of his mother and his childhood at which he was grasping.

How ironic, thought Hilary, that both choices came down to the same thing in the end.

"Couldn't we find the money?" asked Julian.

After nine years of marriage Julian was as ignorant of Hilary's finances as he had been of his mother's. In the RAF, in ENSA, and then in provincial rep - his mother's death had brought him back from a punishing schedule as a leading man in Scarborough - he had lived off his own income, sending her generous remittances out of (one imagined) a sense of marital duty, but without enquiring further into how she spent them, or indeed whether she spent them at all.

"There's nearly three thousand in a savings account," she said. "That's your money that you sent to me; I haven't touched it. But that won't go as far as it used either; it wouldn't do more than help you cover the death duties."

"It would be something," said Julian, reaching at hope as desperately as he reached for her love. "It would be a start. And then surely we could find the rest, together, a little at a time if we had to."

"Darling, I pay surtax as well, twelve per cent on top of the fifty per cent. I've a good income, yes, but nowadays before I pay myself I've another doctor to pay, and the nurse two days a week. Not to mention there's the National Health coming in; heaven knows what may happen after that."

Her own excuses sounded weak in her ears. She had worked hard to build up her practice over the war years, and successfully so. Evacuees, the dramatic expansion of the aircraft factory, new RAF stations with their associated population; the retirement of Drs. Lowe and Dundas - all of these had their effect. She was proud of what she had achieved; while her efforts had hardly been motivated by monetary gain, she was appalled at the idea of ploughing the fruits of those hard-won years back into the Gloucestershire soil.

"Besides which," she continued, "had you really expected to stay here after the war? You've been getting good notices, you've said so yourself. It would make far more sense to be in London, really, for both of us. I've saved up a little..."

Hilary thought it prudent not to mention at this juncture that her savings amounted to some eight thousand pounds, which was a considerable amount even after wartime inflation.

"...and I think I could find really a decent practice in London, but, you see, the wrinkle is selling up here. Betty will be expecting me to make her a partner - and she deserves it, the patients like her more than they do me. I know she would want to buy the practice, if I were to move away, but she can hardly afford to do it outright. I would have to finance the sale; over five years, perhaps."

Five years was the approximate span of time that Hilary had spent plotting her move. Having hired a young assistant doctor - like herself, a promising house surgeon who had discovered that she could find no purchase in the masculine world of hospitals - she had saved every penny that she did not plough back into the surgery, and spent her few free evenings poring thoughtfully over the advertisements in the Lancet. 

Very little of this had been communicated to Julian. It was not that she had kept any of it from him; he, unlike Betty, had hardly ever shown an interest. What disconnected information he had previously taken in would, she realised now, have seemed to him like idle speculation, the sort of fanciful dreaming in which he himself still indulged. He had never mapped the margins of Hilary's reserve; he did not understand that she would talk about something like this only when she had settled it in her own mind.

"I don't give a damn about Betty," Julian said fiercely. "Do you care more about her than you do me?"

Hilary glanced quickly at the ceiling; he had not been loud enough to disturb Betty, who lodged in a set of rooms upstairs. These outbursts had been familiar since the days of Lisa, but they portended little, merely serving to underline his own continuing need to hear that he remained first, best and only in Hilary's life.

"No, darling," said Hilary soothingly, putting aside the papers and taking him into her arms. "No, my sweet, of course I don't."

Julian wept a little then, unshed tears for his mother. Hilary rocked him patiently, listening to the small, gasping sobs that he smothered against her breast. Even now she felt the absurd protectiveness that rose in her body with an almost physical force, urging her to hold nothing back from him. The thought of her stubborn selfishness brought the blood to her face in a hot rush of shame. She had known what marriage to him would mean, after all; she had not deceived herself about that. Yet though she had prepared herself for sacrifices, she never had anticipated this. She had thought that her final sacrifice would be letting him go, expected that he would eventually grow beyond her. It occurred to her now that perhaps he never would.

He looked up at her, blinking quickly in a fruitless attempt to clear eyes that were still brimming over. Hilary wiped at the track of tears with her thumb, then kissed him on the cheek.

"I'm terribly sorry," said Julian, his voice stuffy. "You oughtn't to have to deal with me like this; I'm not fit for company. I should be down a cave or something, not inflicting myself on the populace."

Hilary ignored the remark about the cave. "You've nothing to apologise for; after all I hardly count as the populace. But perhaps," she added, "you're not thinking as clearly as you might be. It will all seem more manageable in the morning."

Julian cast a hateful look towards the papers that now littered the carpet around his feet. He gave them a stealthy, petulant, entirely ineffective kick, and then looked guilty.

"I can't explain it." He sounded calmer now, though his tone suggested tight vocal control. "I don't expect you to understand; it probably doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to you."

She sighed. "I'm sure I don't. Only I can tell how important it is to you."

Her own mother had died not so many years earlier, following her husband by a few months. Hilary's inheritance had been modest, the estate having been split six ways. The family home in Shrewsbury now belonged to Hilary's eldest brother, and thence presumably one day would descend to his eldest son Sam - though after that, Sam being a confirmed bachelor, the future was unclear. Hilary did not feel cheated by this. Being the youngest of seven she had long ago become used to coming last in the family; the mischance of having been born a girl had only reinforced the lesson that one could count on nothing but one's own efforts. It was a lesson that Julian, a treasured only son despite his parentage, had never learned.

"It's where I grew up, it's my home, it's - it's everything."

He shook his head as if unable to come to grips with all that Larch Hill represented to him.

"There's an apple tree in the kitchen garden that I used to climb when I was a boy," he continued. "I know every warren on our land; I would spend hours out there with my ferret, and then we'd have rabbit pie for dinner. I used to help Mother with the roses; she always said it was good I was so tall, because I was better with them than the gardener. I would come home from school and wake up that first morning and be so glad to remember that I was back at home; I knew it as soon as I heard the birds singing. I could never live in London, not for good; I would stifle there."

He trailed off for a moment while his reminiscences found a new direction.

"Think of the lane where you came out walking with me, that first time, in the spring, and then you cleaned up my eye in the scullery afterwards - oh, God, how could I let anyone else have all that, for money?"

His voice broke on the final word, an absolute anguish that could not be gainsaid. It was as if she had proposed to sell his childhood wholesale, without even a memory left behind.

"Well," said Hilary cautiously, "one possibility is the National Trust. I suppose it's possible that they might agree to take on the house."

Hilary immediately regretted having brought the topic up again. She ought to have left him to his grief, complicated enough without the intrusion of monetary concerns and the cold practicalities of life.

 _But after all, he's over thirty_ , she thought. _If he can't come to terms with these things now, then when will he ever?_

"James Lees-Milne," responded Julian with a disgusted tone, as though the name were the whole of an argument. "He was a few years ahead of me at Oxford."

"He was a few years behind me, then, I imagine. But what of it?"

"One heard things," said Julian briefly.

"Be that as it may, wouldn't it be a thought? You wouldn't have to worry about the death duties, or the upkeep, or the looking after. And we would be able to stay - we could have it as a country place."

This last seemed a happy bit of inspiration. Hilary had been horrified to hear herself talk, for she had no intention of becoming the next Mrs Fleming of Larch Hill. After their engagement and marriage she had lost a few private patients to the local gossip, as she had expected she would, but the wartime expansion in her practice had been primarily among newcomers who had never heard of the Fleming family and would not have known her from Adam - or from Eve. With Julian away, she had been her own woman.

A return to Larch Hill would, for Julian, mean a comfortable putting down of roots that had never flourished away from the earth of his Gloucestershire home. For Hilary it would be little short of a burial. Neither nature nor experience had prepared her to be the lady of the manor. She would always suffer by the comparison with a ghost. And there would be no children to inherit the estate once Julian was gone.

"Think of the visitors," said Julian. "Mother never would have stood for it."

Hilary shuddered inwardly; she felt she must say something. "My sweet, there were quite a few things that your mother didn't stand for."

Julian shook his head convulsively; he took her hand in both of his, which she allowed, but then he began turning her simple wedding band around and around on her finger. Sometimes, usually in moments of high stress, he played with her like this, as if she were no more than an extension of himself. Hilary gently withdrew her hand again.

"She would have despised the idea; I heard what she used to say about these families selling up, before the war. _Venal, that's what it is. Some people will grasp at any excuse to move to London and abandon their responsibilities. We may not be a titled family, Julian, but we understand what is important in life._ She would have hated it, all of it. And me, for letting it happen."

He had captured Elaine Fleming's intonation to an eerie degree. Hilary, suddenly, and almost for the first time, could see his mother in the lines of his face. It was as though he had been inhabited by a revenant, come to claim what was hers by right.

Unconsciously he had grabbed for her hand again. This time she left it where it was; she could hardly have pulled it free, so strong was his grip.

"Perhaps she never expected anything else from me," Julian added. "After all, I'm not really a Fleming, am I? Just a cuckoo in the nest. Only I'm all she had, and I'm all that's left now."

At least the twist of bitterness in his speech was distinctively his own; Hilary let out a breath that she did not realise she had been holding.

"Oh, Julian, my darling boy," she began, reaching out to ruffle his hair with her other hand. "Don't talk like that. It isn't..."

He jerked his head away. "I'm not saying any more than the truth. I'm not your child. Don't treat me like one."

Hilary noted his choice of words; not an accident, she thought. He had never put it like that before.

"No, you're not," she said. "You're your mother's son."


End file.
